How the rural poor cope with a climate catastrophe: Evidence from Pakistan's 2022 floods

Policy brief Cities

This policy brief considers findings from a survey of poor households in rural areas of Sindh, Pakistan, seeking to understand how they were impacted by the 2022 floods.

  • This brief explores initial findings from a survey of rural households in Sindh, Pakistan after the 2022 floods. It finds that flooding was severe and incredibly prolonged, disrupting lives long after the monsoon was over.
  • Despite near-universal exposure of the sample to some degree of flooding, evacuation was far from universal. 
  • Very few households in the study have permanently migrated since the floods, raising important questions about the drivers of migration decisions after natural disasters, including the influence of place-based reconstruction programmes.